Jannosch slept for hours. When he woke up he didn’t know where he was. He put a heavy hand on his face, lifted an eyelid, and saw that the sun was probably shining outside a barred window high on the outside wall. Did he remember what had happened? You’ve been beaten up again, Jannosch, that risk is always there. God knows why, but you’ve been taking part in very dangerous operations, though not exactly for Queen and Country, if you ask me. He sighed. His arm dropped to his side. Off again.
Just as well, perhaps. It can’t be much fun to be thinking at this moment about your heavily pregnant wife and a bunch of children who are parked illegally in the wood. Perhaps better to sleep, as unnaturally deep as you can, and at intervals just to concentrate on your broken fingers and a couple of bruises. In a few days you can get on your feet again and you’ll go to Amersfoort and then to Vught. In May, well before your train leaves for the east, you’ll hear they’ve all been arrested. All of them: your wife, your children, and a couple of brothers in’s Hertogenbosch, your parents, another brother, and your sisters on Hoefkade in The Hague, arrested by the Dutch police in the early morning of May 16 so that, after two centuries, our country will again soon be Gypsy-free.
Perhaps it’s better to keep your head down for now.
Did he, I wonder, remember anything about that earlier fateful time? Would he, semiconscious on the dirty mattress, know that the circumstances of his life had their origin hundreds of years before his birth? People who can’t read and write often have a warehouse full of old, hereditary memories at their disposal. I know for certain that the stories were told to him. Long, long ago, Jannosch, your family once traveled around in these parts. One of your great-great-grandmothers, for instance, was hanged in Zut- phen. Her daughter of eight looked on. I happen to know a few details. You lie there, and I’ll tell you.
Her name was Demeter. She called herself Maria Jansz, and people also nicknamed her Monplaisir because that distant grandmother of yours, Jannosch, was a woman with a sunny heart. The events we’re concerned with here took place in about 1726. We are in the province of Gelderland. Right. Listen if you can and want to. On a beautiful morning in the last week of April a hunt for heathens was organized in the woods near Eerbeek. Heathens, I should say, meant you. That’s what you were called in the days when each of the provinces insisted on putting up its own placards, but which all boiled down to exactly the same thing: Within our borders heathens are forbidden, on pain of very severe penalties.
Maria Jansz raced after her daughter at the crack of dawn. The child knew the way under the trees better than she did. Others in the group knew better too, like her husband Schoppe, her sister Laurina, her brother-in-law Cooy- man, even the smallest children, because Maria Jansz had just been released from four years in prison. She had to readjust to being a free woman, albeit one who’d been banished forever. She ran after Mie Magdaleen into the burgeoning ferns and hid. That’s what they all did that day and of necessity the day afterward too. Willem van Haarsholt, the sheriff of the Veluwe, was determined to arrest the group, and the law supported him. Anyone who kept company with the heathens was automatically in the wrong. You didn’t need to have stolen a pair of shoes. You didn’t need to have pointed your weapon at a farmer, or to have said with a dirty, filthy face, “My children and I are going to be sleeping in your barn tonight.”
When Maria Jansz heard dogs at the end of the second day, she knew the game was up. Mie Magdaleen knew too. They were sitting high up in the velvety fork of an old pine tree that was still warm from the day of sun.
“Have a good look, Mie Magdaleen. Is it those rotten pox-ridden swine?”
Your two great-great-grandmothers, Jannosch, stuck their noses through the branches and saw that they were being captured by experts. Four men, chaps who had occupied the office for years, grinning, walked over to the tree which by now was a mass of clawing, barking dogs. They fired a round at random. Maria Jansz knew the red uniforms lined with yellow silk from earlier days. She rolled her eyes like a she-devil.
In the guardroom they found Laurina and her children. Cooyman too was sitting on the stinking floor, but Schoppe wasn’t among them. I don’t need to tell you that no one felt safe when there was the sound of footsteps and they stopped outside the cell door. To everyone’s astonishment, the eight- year-old Mie Magdaleen was the first to be taken for interrogation.
“Where are your father, your uncles, your cousins? Tell me their real names. Tell me where you last slept.”
The girl, who, besides her own language, understood French and German and Dutch, felt it would be a good idea to begin by telling them that she’d been baptized, which no one believed.
“In Arnhem,” she said, which didn’t interest anyone particularly because in those days Gelderland had bigger things on its mind. Now a century-old irritation had reached the point where there was only one way left to describe it, a plague of heathens. People in the Republic and outside were working on a joint solution. Sovereign passions, which went back to the Union of Utrecht, were swept aside. It was permitted to chase people far over each other’s borders, to catch them, interrogate them, and lynch them. A manhunt can’t be organized without good reason. A large-scale clearance needs theories or at least higher motives. What are you supposed to do in the Age of Reason with a group of paupers who refuse to be educated? The cosmopolitan Republic was a place where foreign writers and philosophers were warmly welcomed. It was possible for books that were banned in Spain, Italy, and France to appear there without any problem. The tolerant Republic of still very wealthy merchants had declared war on a group of vagabonds who, in an atmosphere of merciless persecution, had indeed become a major nuisance. What are you to do in the century of Enlightenment, with fortune-telling, animal taming, and the sacred beggar’s hand from the Middle Ages?
“Names!” This was roared very loudly.
“Schoppe, Werenfridus, Abraham, Pierro ...” whispered Mie Magdaleen.
The results were not particularly good with the child, but useful enough, the interrogators thought. They called up Maria Jansz and, after a stinging slap around the ear, got her to talk about her husband.
“Schoppe Elias,” she said, and wondered silently where he was.
“He’s a horseman by profession,” she said, and hoped silently that he’d thought of going to the lodgings of Jan Libertijn, an ex-mercenary who didn’t worry at all about the police or about the fine of three guilders that was imposed for giving heathens lodging.
Maria Jansz told them that her husband had been a cavalryman in the company of Captain Dammaerts in Holland and, when the army no longer needed his sharp eyes and his wild gallop, he became a barge haulier in Friesland. In the hope of giving the conversation a different turn, she began playing the simpleton. With bursts of laughter and grimaces, she swore by the living God that she, Maria Jansz, had never told good fortunes and, by the shed blood of the Savior, knew not a word of the language of the heathens, not a word of that devilish language. . . .
In the interrogation room, impatience grew. One of the magistrates, not the sheriff but one of the aldermen, stood up, grabbed Maria Jansz by her blouse, and pulled it to shreds with one calm claw. There. There it was. On her back, just below the shoulder, a shameful scar cried out that this heathen woman, this one here, had once been flogged in the Great Marketplace of Brussels and afterward had been banished forever from the territories of His Imperial Majesty Charles VI.
Ten days later the court could send the executioner.
Your twenty-two-year-old great-great-aunt Laurina, Jannosch, was flogged very badly, but because of the three children, she didn’t go to prison. It was much cheaper to brand her on the shoulder and banish her for good. Cooyman, your great-uncle, was also flogged and branded, but he, young and strong as he was, was sent to prison and for no less than thirty years. In order to find out the hiding place of his friends, they had interrogated him under torture. They’d stretched him a bit, then winched him up and let him hang there for a
while. Only when they’d strung him up for the second time did he say where in the wood between Eerbeek and Loenen there was a great oblong pit in which the remnants of what had once been an extended family had bivouacked for weeks. Schoppe was indeed picked up the following day, although not alive and nowhere near the pit. Someone in Jan Libertijn’s lodgings had been unable to restrain himself. Betrayal can be quite fun in itself, and with a not insubstantial reward it’s even more fun. Schoppe heard the familiar noise of the authorities approaching. He fled the bedroom, hid in a chicken run a hundred yards away, and was shot dead with a flintlock by a sullen farmer who was completely within his rights.
That left Maria Jansz with a daughter of eight.
Imagine a woman of about thirty with raven hair and sparkling eyes. Excuse me for saying so, but your great- great-grandmother was beautiful. She wore three skirts, one over the other, and a shawl, though the family capital, the golden rings in her ears, had already gone. For two or three weeks she’d been sitting with Mie Magdaleen in the cell, pending, as it’s called, a sentence that she of course already knew. What a lot of trouble they were going to on her account! Heathens were heathens, rabble that camped in tents on the borders. They preferred a fight to the death to being caught. They fled from province to province. You could shoot them or punish them, I assure you a trial wasn’t always needed. But for Maria Jansz, would you believe it, documents were being applied for in The Hague and Zaltbom- mel. I think, and you’ll probably agree with me, that for once they wanted to do things properly. What was happening here was the upholding of the law.
So Maria Jansz ate for a few weeks more, and drank. The fantastic fact of her imminent violent death didn’t prevent her from talking to Mie Magdaleen and herself about seas and mountains and cities and streets. Life, Mie Magdaleen, is basically happiness. Anyone who saw her sitting there, smiling a little, under a barred window which the odors of the city wafted through, was convinced that every hour, every minute, continues to exert its full rights over you, even when you’re waiting for the executioner. Meanwhile the documents arrived. Zaltbommel, 1717.
Maria Jansz had been sentenced to death there once before.
When Maria Jansz had been arrested back then in the vicinity of Zaltbommel, her chances were poor. Five of the band she consorted with bore the brand of Brussels and six that of the Amstelland. Five had been banished from The Hague and ten from Kampen. One of them, Ijisbrand Montagne, her father, had had his cheek slashed in Tiel. Her brothers, Willem and Nobel, still young, had been flogged in Friesland and Waterland. And her first husband, whose name was Sinte, had been punished in Utrecht without, nonetheless, breaking arms or legs, which was a stroke of luck. Confronted with the problem of finding anywhere to stay, they could, at least, quickly reach thickly wooded, forbidden Gelderland. There they were found later that year by the scout of the Bommelerwaard, cooking at night on fires banked up high. None of them could show that they had obtained the firewood and the food honestly. Even she, Maria Jansz, with all her talent of an outlawed twenty-year-old, was not believed when she said that she’d paid for the pig’s head in her pot with a nice handkerchief.
All the men were hanged, and of the women only Laurina was spared because of her youth. But look, and it wasn’t difficult to see, the heavily pregnant Maria Jansz was in precisely the kind of condition that required a reprieve. Just as no human being is ever completely good or completely bad, so a murderous government is not completely murderous. The conscience dotes on poetry. The innocent and pristine infant was born a month later, when the January sun poured into the houses everywhere and made them all light and bright. It was nice that on that day a woman in a dark dungeon, who had just given birth amid furious sobs, received good news. The deferred death sentence had been annulled. The States granted her pardon in a truly humanist way. Go, Maria Jansz. Be off with you and never show yourself in these parts again!
Well, you know the story: Seven years later they would see her again in the Ministry of Justice. She was with a man again and, unfortunately, had again been tried and imprisoned in The Hague. Honesty doesn’t pay for people who’ve always been persecuted. After she’d been flogged in the Groenmarkt, the house of correction on Prinsengracht had plenty of work for the sturdy young woman, but not, of course, for the child. When Maria Jansz entered the institution for hard labor, which with the three rows of windows one above the other was the largest building she would ever see, Mie Magdaleen was given a shove. There, girl, is your family. They’ve got forty-eight hours to leave Holland!
Today she would have to look.
Meanwhile Maria Jansz had admitted everything that was in the document and in addition had mentioned her floggings near Hamburg and in Koblenz, the latter for stealing three loaves of bread from the army.
“From poverty,” she had politely explained.
What followed was a well-argued and logically constructed indictment that concluded with a cool demand for the maximum sentence.
It was a beautiful morning, May 19. Opposite the gallows on the market square in Zutphen was a row of blossoming chestnut trees under which you could hear everyday life, talk and laughter. Then you could also hear the trundling of an approaching cart. The first to get out was Mie Magdaleen. Because the civil authorities wanted to urge the young creature to mend her ways, it was included in her mother’s sentence that, as an example, the child must watch the execution at close quarters. Mie Magdaleen followed the direction of a pointing finger, took an upper seat at the left corner of the gallows, and looked into the crowd with a woebegone face and astonished eyes. She knew that Laurina must be standing somewhere, the aunt whom she was to accompany after the hanging.
Then Maria Jansz climbed up with her hands on her skirts. The crowd began jeering. Ignoring the tumult, perhaps hearing none of it, she turned to the public, straightened her shoulders, and waited without moving a muscle in her face. Had her spirit already fled? Was she looking out far above everyone over the shining fields and villages bathed in the golden sunshine? While a small procession of solemnly dressed men took their seats, an intolerable tension arose in the square which centered on the body and particularly the eyes of the heathen woman. Not a soul was interested in what crime she’d committed, they were simply eager for her secret to be violated. When the sun was already warm, the executioner put the rope around her neck and the condemned woman did not resist. Don’t look, Mie Magdaleen, you’ll never ever learn anything from this handiwork! It went quiet. Do I need to tell you that Demeter, alias Maria Jansz, born on this side of the district of Cologne, made the ugliest face in her life?
4
For years we in Benckelo saw that couple living together in a way that’s familiar in the country areas. Apparently he makes all the decisions. You could always see that it was Joseph who did the business. With a fiery expression he would survey the stallion with whom Bellaheleen was to be crossed. “Okay,” he would say, already turning around and walking away almost petulantly. “Right. I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”
In that first year there was an overwhelming amount to do: the extension of the stables, the design, the wood, the quarter-inch-thick roofing felt. Joseph gave instructions with delighted conviction. Lucie stood a little to one side. She followed as the negotiations were conducted in a highhanded tone, smiled a bit, blinked, and made sure that it was he, her husband, who paid the bills when building materials were delivered.
You go ahead, do what you want, was Gerard’s quite sensible attitude at the time. He went on with the selling of his land, acre after acre, which he’d decided to do for obscure reasons. That the seriousness and imagination of Joseph seemed to be perfectly attuned to his daughter’s heartbeat was one thing. It was quite a different matter that the little stud became more and more profitable.
To tell the truth, I don’t believe, as everyone else did, that Lucie was subservient to her husband. What he wanted was all right, that’s true, and what he didn’t like she thought was wrong. Once, w
hen she was pregnant and was about to boil a great pan of mussels, he forbade her to do so with a gesture that was much like a slap. How things were between those two was hard to tell. For example, when Joseph left in the early summer, an event that always took Lucie completely by surprise but was regarded as inevitable and predictable in the village after the first few times, the horse business went on running in perfect order.
Benckelo is beautiful in summer. When Lucie took on a life of her own, the crops shot up. The farms sank into the green and yellow-brown land. They seemed to be low and flat and just as content as the cows that lay chewing their cud with their legs tucked underneath them. The soil here is diluvial sand, mixed with clay from rivulets and streams. It all sounds very peaceful, you’d say. Yet on the northwest side of the village there once was a castle with two gates. The area around Benckelo has witnessed a lot of violence. Spaniards, Prussians, and French sent their cavalry along the hedge-bordered paths to Enschede and Hengelo. There was plundering and constant feuding with the bishops of Munster, who became more amenable only in the eighteenth century when the wretched vagrancy problem was better tackled jointly. The last Gypsy to be arrested in the area at the time was a childlike old man called Doggie. His capturer was a given a reward of thirty Carolus guilders.
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